Clean install of Lion and proper Time Capsule procedure. Advice Please.

Question

Clean install of Lion and proper Time Capsule procedure. Advice Please.

Good day all,

I have performed a clean install of Lion. I have previously been using a 1TB Time Capsule to backup my Snow Leopard disk. I did not use the Time Capsule to restore my files to Lion, instead I restored individual files from a backup of my Home folder on a seperate exteral hard drive. I have not yet enabled Time Machine in Lion. Is it advisable to erase the Snow Leopard backups using Airport Utility before enabling Time Machine? If I enable Time Machine without erasing the Time Capsule will it ask me if I want to erase or will it simply begin another set of back up data leaving the previous backups intact?

Thank you!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Nov 3, 2011 10:17 PM

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Answer 1

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Nov 4, 2011 3:22 PM in response to Father McKenzie

If you had used Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant to put your data back, Time Machine would do an "incremental" backup, of what's new or changed.

Since you didn't, TM doesn't realize the erased disk has most of the same stuff as before, and will treat your Mac's internal HD as a different one, and will do a new, full backup of it. You cannot prevent that. (If your backups were on an external HD, you could make it "associate" the backups with the "new" disk, but that doesn't work on network backups for some reason.) 😟

So your best bet is probably to erase the TC's internal HD.

If it's quite large, however, you may not have to. If it's at least 2.2 times the size of what's on your internal HD, there will be room for a new backup.

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Answer 2

Jan 20, 2012 1:38 PM in response to Pondini

Thank you.

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